Category Archives: Personal Progress

You should be able to–with no problem!–go read Professor Hugh Rank’s outstanding website. I think you will learn a tremendous amount of information on how to recognize–and thus short-circuit–manipulative and dishonest communications. Enjoy!

Thank you for your patience in waiting for my next posts. I apologize for how long this took, and I had a problem I had to clear up. All cleared up though: happy to report that. Thank you for bearing with me; I appreciate your support.:)I’ll be doing some **MAJOR** posting tonight. I’ve discovered propaganda analysis as a fitting tool for resisting PUAism.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that not only are the terms of Propadanga easily identifiable, anyone with a good knowledge of PUAism (a.k.a. seduction methods) also readily pick up on PUA methodology being easily classified as a subset of propaganda–or at least uses many methods recognizible as having their origin in propaganda.

It appears to the casual reader that I haven’t been building my blog, and for this I apologize. However, *I* have been doing a lot of online research and exploration of topics, and I’ve added several blogs and websites to my Blogroll. There are three that I would like to point you towards. Site 1: Richie Pilbeam’s “Crimitism” blog. If you haven’t read it, it’s a MUST. Richie is a hard-hitting, Australian male feminist who’s as good a word gunslinger as you’re going to find in the blogosphere. I invite you to read a sample of Richie’s hard-as-nails dissection of the New Patriarchy as he takes on “The Alphabet of Manliness:”

Read it, and savor it. IMHO, it doesn’t get much better than this: “Most people do think women are nags, men are inherently violent, goths are boring, and Garfield is a bit shit. People want to be told these things. People also want to believe that they’re the centre of the universe, and the only person with the guts to call a spade a spade, so if you can dress the same material up as a way of sticking it to the man, it’s no surprise that your website will end up more popular than Pepsi’s. It’s just Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus‘ angsty younger brother who wears an ironic Godzilla t-shirt.” Or, how about this?

[In a world where metrosexuals–stylish, well-groomed, and sharply dressed men–have taken the center stage in defining the new masculinity, small pockets of men are starting to emerge, rebelling against the status quo.]

[- Maddox, in his introduction to the book on Amazon.com] (Richie here quotes Maddox from his introduction to the “Alphabet of Manliness”)

“Fun fact of the day #2: Metrosexuality is, and has always been, a choice. Men’s right to be a slob is not under threat because of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, and describing metrosexuality as ‘the status quo’ just because it’s visible is so ridiculous I don’t know where to begin. There’s no genuine social pressure on every man out there to spend / waste his money on wax, cosmetics and firming lotion, and if he chooses to do so, we call him a metrosexual to differentiate him from the majority. And you can take ‘metrosexual’ as a byword for ‘fag’ or ‘poof’ or ‘himbo’ if you want, but it plainly isn’t just a euphemism; it’s a positive word that implies metropolitan sophistication and sexual potency. There’s no equivalent word for a woman who rejects the look of the female majority. They’re all insults. This whole ‘Reclaim your manliness!’ bollocks would be cringeworthy even without the misogyny, homophobia and ape-pack mentality that always accompanies it.”

Ha-HAH! Go, Richie, go! I couldn’t have done any better myself…

Site 2: Persuasion Analysis, Dr. Hugh Rank’s contribution to analysing propaganda and advertising. His website is easy to navigate and extremely educational; so far, it’s the best one that I found of its kind, although I haven’t exhausted the Internet by any means. As a sample of his efforts, check out the link I’m providing here:

He does a cagey analysis of the Bush Administration, Dr. Rank does–yes indeed!

“About 1980, when I originally wrote the section on war propaganda, Osama bin Ladin was being supported by the CIA in Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein was being supported in its war against Iran by the US. Neither of these wars then was on my mind which was centered primarily on the patterns of rhetoric of previous European wars. A decade later, the “Cold War” was over when the USSR disintegrated. Two decades later, Bush proclaimed the “war on terrorism” and linked our old friends, Osama and Saddam, as co-conspirators. Frankly, I do not know specifically who our friends and enemies will be twenty or thirty years from now. But, I think these patterns I’ve observed in the past will appear in the future.” (From the above-mentioned article entitled, “Bush Bashing?” on Dr. Rank’s “Persuasion Analysis)

And then finally, I decided to get a little spooky and daring. I decided to provide a link to the US Air Force’s Air War College site “Cyberspace and Information Operations Study Center.” The site *is* surprisingly open to civilians, so I decided to provide the link to my readers as an opportunity for them to read about psychological operations, psychological warfare, mass persuasion, etc. You will notice that if you examine this site carefully, it does have a section on Neuro-linguistic Programming. To those who say NLP doesn’t work, I say beware: the military doesn’t generally waste time on ineffectual methods. Anyone who thinks NLP is mere sleight-of-hand or doesn’t work is laying him/herself open to manipulation…

What I’ve decided to do with my blog is this; rather than not post *anything* on my blog publicly while working on big long essays, I’ve decided to do reasonably short public posts on my blog *until* I get my essays finished and *then* post them on the blog. This way the blog is active, there’s more reason for my readers to check back frequently to see what I’ve written, and hopefully I can engender some really lively discussions serving as springboards to other research/essays/methods of resistance. I *am* working on Part 2 to “On PUAs, Mind Control, and Patriarchy,” but it’s slow-going because I have to get some of the Vance Packard writings, which will not be republished until late July. Ergo, I’m (hopefully) doing the sensible thing by concentrating on doing daily posts and other essays in the meanwhile.